“Because Eco is an online game composed of many different people playing together, it drives home the fact that climate change is not just a scientific problem but a political one, and building the political will to solve it, even more so than the scientific understanding, is the primary challenge we face today.” The mental model that is built from this first-hand experience of solving climate change in a virtual world is then directly transferable to the real one, and players can take from their own experiences the scope of the problem, the challenges that must be faced, and most importantly, how to go about solving them.
It builds a responsibility and agency in the player, embracing the sacrifices and advancements that are required to solve it. “In these high-stakes virtual worlds, the solution comes from you and the group or not at all. They must also build the technology to stop a meteor on a collision course with the planet, without polluting the world and killing it off in the process before that even happens. If they cut down too many trees, for example, they might kill off a species. In Eco, players must create a government encompassing the viewpoints of many other players, finding common ground among different biases and beliefs, creating regulations and electing leaders and passing laws that both protect the environment and advance societal progress, lest their world be destroyed. However, every resource they take affects the environment it is taken from, and without careful planning and understanding of the ecosystem, lands can become deforested and polluted, habitats destroyed, and species left extinct.īoth an entertainment and educational tool, Eco calls on players to work together to ensure not just their own survival, but that of the world around them, which is affected by just about every action they take. It is the role of players to thrive in this environment by using resources from the world to eat, build, discover, learn and invent. Eco, a “global survival game” that puts ecological issues at the heart of its simulation game play, is helping to raise awareness among players about climate change and to devise practical solutions, which is then “directly transferable from the virtual world to the real world”.Įco, from the US-based developer Strange Loop Games, is an online game where players must collaborate to build a civilisation in a world where everything they do affects the environment.Īll resources come from a simulated ecosystem, with thousands of plants and animals simulating 24/7.
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